JK Rowling has said that she wishes she could go back to her 16-year-old self, “who’s lying there in the dark with the joss sticks, listening to Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”, and tell her that one day she will meet Morrissey – and that the Smiths singer will know who she is.

The novelist, who has sold over 450m copies of her Harry Potter books and whose almost 6m followers on Twitter regularly fall into paroxysms of delight when she responds to them personally, was speaking to Lauren Laverne for Saturday’s Weekend magazine. Rowling told Laverne that she understood why the Harry Potter book “still means so much” to adults in their 20s, “because I know how much it meant to me to meet Morrissey”.

Their encounter occurred in Harvey Nichols, revealed the self-confessed “big Smiths fan”. “We were looking at each other, getting nearer and nearer, and at almost exactly the same moment we both put out our hands. What was amazing to me was, Morrissey knew who I was,” said the novelist. “I was with my sister-in-law and she said, ‘Put. Your. Hand. Down.’ I was walking around afterwards with my hand out, like that ... I said, ‘Morrissey touched me!’ She said, ‘I know, you look stupid.’”

She compared the experience to that of her fans, saying that “the people who mean something to you at 16, 17, are the people who are getting you through stuff. So I absolutely understand why someone who is hanging on to Harry Potter as a safe place at 13 is excited at 21 to talk about what [Hogwarts] house they’d be in. I don’t think it’s infantile. I don’t think it’s any more infantile than me being excited to meet Morrissey ... I wanted to go back to my 16-year-old self who’s lying there in the dark with the joss sticks, listening to Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, and tell her, ‘You’ll meet him! He’ll know who you are!’”

JK Rowling meets Lauren Laverne: ‘Success never feels the way you think it will’

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Admitting that she has had a “really uncomfortable” relationship with her own fame – “If you want to be an author, the odds are you’re a pretty introverted person, who doesn’t particularly want to worry about what they look like. And fame, in its modern incarnation, demands pretty much the reverse mindset” – Rowling told Laverne she loved the democracy of Twitter.

“There came a point where Harry became so enormous that, at a reading, there were 2,000 people. You can’t answer everyone’s questions. Twitter gave that back to me. No one has to buy a ticket. It’s very democratic,” she said.

During the Scottish referendum in 2014, Rowling, who voted no and spoke publicly about her reasons for doing so, came in for a barrage of attacks on the social media site. She has said previously that she was described as “‘traitor’, ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’, told to go back where I came from, lambasted for taking Scottish benefits”.

But the site, she told Laverne, “has been an unmixed blessing, trolls included – they genuinely do not bother me”, although she blocks people who swear or are “really rude” to her, and mutes those who are “annoying rather than directly offensive”.

But “my block and mute lists aren’t long because I have quite a high tolerance for people I wouldn’t necessarily want to be friends with – I’m interested in what they’re saying”, she said. “You wouldn’t want to sanitise your timeline to the point that you weren’t seeing some of these characters. Let’s call them characters.”

Rowling also spoke of how she had longed to stay anonymous while writing her crime novels under the Robert Galbraith pseudonym. “I had this dream that I’d manage to get two or three books out before being rumbled,” she told Laverne. “It was a great liberation, thinking, ‘No one will know that it’s me.’”

When she sent her first Galbraith manuscript to publishers, she was “so thrilled with every rejection letter, you have no idea. It just felt so real – it was all about the writing.”

A small press wanted to publish her first Galbraith thriller, but Rowling felt that “ it would have been a big secret to ask a small press to keep”, and by then Little, Brown had expressed interest, so she signed with the major publisher.

Not, however, before landing a handful of rejections, she admitted. “There was one publisher who said, ‘Look, we really like this, but we’ve just taken on another guy who’s working in the same geographical area’ – and I was delighted. I’m not going to say I was as excited as any first-time author would be, because it’s not the same. Any first-time author would be very cast down: ‘You liked it – and you’re not going to take it on!’ I was just, ‘You liked it! That’s great!’ I wish it could have gone on a bit longer,” she said.

And the first publisher to turn down Harry Potter also wrote the “rudest rejection” to her submission as Robert Galbraith, she revealed. “So I think it’s safe to say I will never write for them. They clearly don’t like me, in whatever way I present myself ... We don’t want your bloody poetry!”